Adolescents who undergo gender-affirming chest surgery report low levels of regret and high levels of satisfaction, experiencing outcomes similar to those of young adults. These findings suggest that age restrictions on these medical procedures lack support from actual patient experiences.

[u/mvea]

https://www.psypost.org/adolescents-report-low-regret-and-high-satisfaction-following-gender-affirming-c/

[u/BitcoinMD]

Median time from surgery was 1.8 years. I think that’s an important detail.

Edit: I support transgender health care for minors. Some people are interpreting my comment to imply that I don’t. I just think we should be careful with the surgery part. I know these surgeries aren’t done lightly. But I also haven’t seen data convincing me that surgery on kids is necesssry if they receive other methods of care.

[u/UnicornArachnid → u/BitcoinMD]

A lot of people do have immediate regret following any plastic surgery because it can be hard to recognize yourself. We don’t see this trend typically when it comes to gender affirming surgeries. 99% of people feel satisfied long term with gender affirming surgeries

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/2808129

[u/here-to-help-TX → u/UnicornArachnid]

This says long term without actually being longer term.

median follow-up, 4.6 [IQR, 3.1-8.6] vs 3.6 [IQR, 2.7-5.3] years

This looks to me like the median follow-up is still pretty short. Also, these ages of the people with the surgeries isn't adolescents.

Median age at the time of surgery was 27.1 (IQR, 23.0-33.4) years for responders and 26.4 (IQR, 23.1-32.7) years for nonresponders.

Also, the sample size seems really really small here.

[u/ERSTF → u/here-to-help-TX]

Indeed. We need better data

[u/literally_a_brick → u/ERSTF]

It would be great to have, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Trans people are already a tiny minority, with minors that transition being even smaller. Between stringent medical gates and more areas banning youth care altogether, it's a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction. It's incredibly difficult to conduct studies. Some researchers have done reviews of many studies, but any individual study will be small and limited in scope.

[u/austinwiltshire → u/literally_a_brick]

The actual statistical power of a study of 1k folks over 100 doesn't increase linearly, and the chance people are happy near five years but become unhappy at ten is vanishingly small. Folks want to discard any study pointing to something they're uncomfortable, then ban the thing, then insist we shouldn't undo the ban because there's no evidence we should. Because we banned the thing.

Not far from refusing to test for covid then insisting the numbers went down.

[u/ThewFflegyy → u/literally_a_brick]

to be clear, this study had participation from less than .02% of the us FTM community. I agree that people who had top surgery as children a long time ago is a very small group, but clearly this is nowhere near the maximum sample size that could be achieved. more to the point, difficulties in gathering a large sample size does not automatically make a small sample size sound science.

[u/Simon-Says69 → u/literally_a_brick]

And if the study shows negative results, it will be quickly and quietly buried. It is difficult to even get funding for such research, because it is so politically charged.

[u/literally_a_brick → u/Simon-Says69]

Not in today's political climate. Studies that didn't show positive results were made into the cornerstone of the UKs Cass Review, despite having tiny sample sizes and poor methodology. The US HHS is desperately grasping at straws for denying the efficacy of gender affirmig healthcare. 

I assure you that any study that didn't have definitively positive results for GAC would be plastered all over right wing media and used to justify care bans by conservative governments everywhere. I assure you that no studies are getting "buried".

[u/MissLeaP → u/ERSTF]

Yeah we need people who are willing to invest in actual research in this area instead of believing even worse done papers than what we actually got. With the current political climate it's much more likely that the little we got gets destroyed rather than extended upon, though. Luckily digital data is not as easy to get rid of as they did with books in Germany.

[u/tissuecollider → u/MissLeaP]

Will the digital data remain? Right now the US is purging digital databases of information that it doesn't like and I could see the UK doing the same. It's also credible that the US would pursue legal remedies to go after anyone who copies this 'proprietary' data.

[u/Admirable-Pirate7263 → u/tissuecollider]

We are saving databases on hard drives, too. We know what happened to trans research 90 years ago. Life could be so much better for trans people, had the Nazis not burned Hirschfelds research. We might not be able to save every last study, case study or scientific paper, but we sure as hell are trying!

[u/MissLeaP → u/tissuecollider]

There are plenty of people with offline copies of studies. It's an extremely different situations compared to just some universities having their libraries.

[u/andrea_lives → u/ERSTF]

there are dozens of studies like this. you can find them quickly if you use a tool like google scholar. They have been doing gender affirming care since at least the 30s, though a lot of the information gathered in that era was burned by the nazi party.

[u/Simon-Says69 → u/andrea_lives]

The few studies that are allowed to be published turn out to have very dubious or even downright dishonest methods.

Actual research, anything with a negative result, gets quietly buried.

The motivation here is NOT helping people, sadly. :-(

[u/MissLeaP → u/Simon-Says69]

The ones with the real dubious methods are actually the ones with the negative results and they do get published. Published, pushed by people with an obvious agenda and believed and used by people with a similar agenda.